I was very pleased to disembark from the sleeper bus. After having held in a pee for the past 10 hours, I was now in Amritsar.
After managing to get a hideous cockroach out of my bag (an awkward activity which captured the attention of a friendly local who came over to try and help) I wandered into a nearby café and got my first Punjabi breakfast. Aloo Kulcha.
Kulcha is like parantha I guess but… slightly thicker? Slightly crispier? It came with a dollop of makun on top. I had been waiting for this. Raghav’s descriptive and passionate relaying of Punjabi’s love of butter had stayed with me. They indeed love their butter in Punjab. The makun covered aloo kulcha was truly delicious.
Now I headed towards the centre of the city where I’d booked a hostel. The streets here were paved and cobbled. Fortress-like walls stood majestically over the red buildings, dressing the city centre in great garb.
Almost every man who passed me by wore a turban or some kind of head covering. All the men in billboard advertisings also wore turbans. There must be more Sikhs here than anywhere else in India. I passed beneath red brick archways which made me feel like I was a hundreds of years in the past. Amritsar is a feast for the eyes. There came to be one particular archway however, by a large fountain of water which I could never pass through without handfuls of people cornering me for pictures.
Peaking over the red and orange buildings and sometimes visible from the paved streets was the golden dome of the white clock-tower. The marble sentry that stands over the gateway to the Golden Temple. Amritsar’s Treasure.
Sometimes it feels like I’ve been transported hundreds of years into the past when walking these paved streets That is until I notice a large McDonalds “M” jutting out from one of these otherwise otherworldly buildings. But then I look around elsewhere and see some strange God Head staring down at me from an arched alcove high upon another structure, and my mind is dazzled.
After checking into my hostel and exploring a bit more, I set off to Amritsar rail station. I wanted to get a train ticket from Amritsar to Jammu. If I could get to Jammu, I could get to Kashmir. And if I could get to Kashmir then… well… heaven on earth apparently.
I was getting close to the station when I was suddenly plunged into one of the most absurd situations I have ever been in. Two guys pulled up nearby me on a bike, one of them shouting over to me.
‘We are gay!’ He was shouting. ‘We are gay! We want you to join us!’
I stared at them in confusion. How could they be so confident? I politely declined and continued walking. What kind of city was this? But the guys followed alongside me on the bike. It was the middle of the day. The sun beat down. Broad daylight. The guy continued to shout to me while the other one drove the bike. They wouldn’t leave me alone. A car coming along in the opposite direction began to slow down, the driver stuck his head out the window watching this absolute circus playing out by the pavement. ‘I want your dick!’ The guy on the bike was now shouting. This was a fucking shit-show. More people on the street – men in turbans – were now starting to stare and I suddenly realised there was no easy way out of the spotlight.
I stopped walking and took a good look at the guys on the bike. Then I jumped on the back and we sped off.
I really didn’t know what I was doing… well, I kind of did. I was nervous about it of course, but my decision was not a complete act of desperation. I followed my gut. This perhaps reckless decision led me to discover two wondrous personalities, and a secret doorway opened.
We pulled up down a side street where litter lay in heaps. We disembarked and I followed the two guys into the nearest building and up a tall flight of steps.
The first guy, the one who had been shouting in the street, was called Shrarvil and he was 19. The driver was Kalyan. 23. I followed them into the bedroom.
One thing I asked these guys, before we ever made it to the apartment, was: how did you know? How did you know I was gay?
They did not know, Shrarvil said to me. But the Goddess Kali had told them. The Goddess who?
Now that I was in the apartment, Shrarvil excitedly took me through a side door and showed me his shrine to the Goddess Kali. Then we went to the bed. But the two Hindu lads were only friends and would not have sex with each other. I quickly realised they were planning to take it in turns with me. I started to feel even more uncomfortable than when they’d first pulled up beside me on the road.
Shrarvil removed his top and lay on the bed and I began to kiss him. But then the second guy – Kalyan – walked out of the room doing something on his phone. I freaked out. My imagination running wild. He must be calling their other friends to come and rob me, I thought. I was only too aware of my bag sitting in the corner of the room with my laptop and money inside it. I demanded that Kalyan stay in the room. So Sharvil and I continued, but now Kalyan was sitting on the bed next to us just watching and now things felt weird. Not that they didn’t feel weren’t weird before, but now they felt really weird.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to join in?’ I asked Kalyan awkwardly.
Long story short… he did.
Not too long later, we were all back on Kalyan’s bike, dropping Sharvil off at the train station. He was returning to his hometown of Pathankot. I asked Shrarvil how Kalyan and he had come to know each other, and how they had learned each other were gay in a society that doesn’t really talk about it. They met at their local Hindu Temple, Shrarvil explained to me. Dedicated to the Goddess Kali. Of course…
Kali, it turns out, is the Goddess of darkness, destruction and death and she is often depicted wielding a sword in one hand and carrying a severed head in another. Despite her disconcerting appearance, her destruction is aimed at evil and protecting the good.
Shrarvil told me that if I wanted, Kalyan would take me to the temple of the Goddess Kali. Hell yes, I wanted to go. So that was that. Sharvil departed, and after learning from the train desk that there were no trains running to Jammu, I took Kalyan back to my hotel room where we got to know each other a little better.
But Kalyan’s English was extremely limited. And to make matters even more difficult, Hindi isn’t even his first language. Amritsar is in Punjab after all, and the people here mainly speak Punjabi. The only Punjabi I knew were a couple of phrases I taught myself in Delhi: ‘Sat Sri Akal’ = Hello, and ‘Maph Kareyo’= Sorry. So, there we stood, in the hotel bathroom under a shower of hot water, physically intimate, yet with the majority of our communication being washed away in translation. (In the very little translation there was.)
I was really looking forward to seeing the Temple of the Goddess Kali. In fact, I could not get it out of my mind. But to my disappointment, Kalyan didn’t take me. I’d have asked him why but, as I said, most of what we said to each other was washed away in translation. Days later I searched for the Temple of the Goddess Kali, determined to see it before I left Amritsar, following google maps down winding back alleys. Shrarvil told me that people go there to let the goddess possess them. That they roll around on the floor after letting her inside of them. He had shown me videos.
But I never found the Temple of the Goddess Kali. Google maps in India is inaccurate as Hell, I sometimes wonder if it has any accuracy at all. And walking around I couldn’t help but wonder: maybe the Temple doesn’t exist….? But I know It does.
